Esters beat Varnam 3-1 at Finnvedsvallen on Tuesday evening in the Superettan regular season, twenty-fourth round. The visitors took all three points from Sweden's second tier and tightened things up on a night where the hosts never got going after losing their early advantage.
Filip Olsson opened the scoring for Esters in the twenty-fifth minute, and the home side stayed close until the break. Varnam levelled through Viktor Claesson in the sixty-seventh minute, but Esters had already picked up two bookings in five minutes by then — Claesson went off in the sixty-third and the visitors brought on Calle Johansson and Musa Oluwaseyi Akinfenwa together.
They came for a cross he never reached, and Esters went ahead again in the seventy-second when Hannes Bladh Pijaca found the net. Noah Söderberg added a third in the seventy-sixth, and the visitors kept knocking on the door until the full-time whistle. Claesson picked one up last week for his yellow card, and this time the referee didn't hesitate.
We tipped the away side to win at forty percent confidence, and it paid off. The visitors were dominant in the air from set plays, but more importantly they stayed compact and punished the home side when they switched off at a set piece. Varnam had the shots but couldn't convert them.
The statistics tell a familiar story. Varnam finished with ten shots on target and eight off, while Esters managed five on and five off. Both sides held fifty percent possession, but the visitors won the attack battle seventy-eight to sixty-six and took eleven corners to the hosts' three. Shots accuracy sat at fifty percent for Varnam against thirty-eight for Esters.
Esters move up to seventh place with thirty-six points from twenty-four games, while Varnam drop to twelfth with twenty-four points. The gap between them widens to twelve points, and the visitors have now won eleven of twenty-four while the hosts have managed only seven victories.